LUKE MARTIN

Experimental composer and performer

BIOGRAPHY

Luke Martin is an experimental composer, performer, and poet currently living in Boston, MA. His work focuses on the concepts of silence, blandness, and social sculpture and is primarily interested in exploring limits of perception and methods of re-evaluating (and altering) processes of everyday life, i.e., ways of being in the world.

Luke has been influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, The Situationist International, Deleuze and Guattari, the Wandelweiser Group, Gertrude Stein, and others. Luke performs (and has performed) with various groups on no-input mixer, guitar, objects, and other various odds-and-ends including sinecure (Andy Young, Ben Levinson, Isaac Aronson), Variant State (Michael Rosenstein, Howard Martin, Jesse Collins, Chris Johnson), DogStar Orchestra (large ensemble of experimental musicians / festival of experimental music in LA), Ordinary Affects (experimental music ensemble; Morgan Evans-Weiler, Laura Cetilia, James Falzone), The Readers Chorus LA (a reading group led by Sara Roberts and Jordan Biren), and others. He has an M.F.A. in music composition from California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Michael Pisaro, and a B.A. in English and Music from Colby College (magna cum laude, honors in music composition/theory). He works as an adjunct professor of music at Massasoit Community College and the grant writer for Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles, CA) and Fullerton Friends of Music (Fullerton, CA). Additionally, he works with Boston-based experimental music organization Non-Event (Boston, MA) and as an associate producer at the Ojai Music Festival (Ojai, CA). Luke co-directs, with Aaron Foster Breilyn, an experimental music festival in Boston: the co-incidence festival. He produces vespers, a series of experimental music in Greater Boston and runs, with Morgan Evans-Weiler and Sam Leviazar, a small label called fold.

STATEMENT

Some (current) artistic concerns include: composition as engagement in process(es); composition as perception / attention; being in the world; consideration of performance / composition from a point of silence or doing nothing; critiquing the self-desire to do something (more); listening; field recording; composition as fundamentally social; sound as always happening; sound as incidental / by-product of (other) processes; how we engage in pre-determined or taken-for-granted processes constantly; also, constant creation of (new) processes or compositions by everyone/thing everywhere; negation of the logic of capital to create against and beyond; collective authority; layering of communal activity located on the edges or outside of perception; meeting / communicating / seeing / listening / being in a fog; silence as fog; silence as being in the world; position of relationality between subject and object; being bored or engaging with boredom as being in the world / being creative; potential.